At present the Internet is fairly popular, Instant Messaging (IM) services based on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are integrated into more and more devices. VoIP's greatest advantage is that the Internet and a globally IP-connected environment can be used to provide more and better services compared to traditional services.
In addition, with the development of cloud computing in recent years, a cloud platform provides various services with new vigor, enhances performance of service, lowers cost for providing service and also lowers requirements on terminals.
When IM services are deployed on a cloud platform and a user accesses an IM application through a thin client, there may be a problem that media time delay is inevitably exacerbated due to the system architecture.
At present a VoIP service media stream and signaling stream in a cloud platform environment mainly include: a user A accesses an IM client 1 software running in a virtual desktop through a thin client 1. Operations performed by the user on peripherals on the thin client are transmitted to the IM software in the virtual desktop according to a virtual desktop transmission protocol, and the peripherals may include a keyboard, mouse, microphone, camera and the like, the virtual desktop transmission protocol may include an Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) protocol, a PC-over-IP (PCoIP), a Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment (SPICE), a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and the like. Local data collected by an earphone/camera is also transmitted by the thin client 1 to an IM client in the virtual desktop through the virtual desktop transmission protocol and the earphone/camera receives an audio/video media stream transmitted from the opposite end. As shown in FIG. 1, transmitting a media stream from a calling side to a called user side includes the following steps:
Step S102, an audio/video media stream is transmitted from a thin client 1 of the calling side to a virtual desktop 1, and the virtual desktop 1 forwards the media stream to an IM client 1.
Step S104, the IM client 1 forwards the media stream to an IM client 2 of the called side, and the IM client 2 forwards the media stream to a virtual desktop 2 of the called side.
Step S106, the virtual desktop 2 then forwards the media stream to a thin client 2.
Particularly in an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network environment, there are a number of media streams desired to be transmitted, thus a problem regarding time delay becomes apparent; furthermore, too many forwards readily result in distortion of data. To sum up, the calling side and the called side can converse with each other only after several transmission of the media stream, but aforementioned several forwards of the media stream occupy network bandwidth and exacerbates time delay of the network, and distortion of the audio/video may be resulted in due to many forwarding and encoding/decoding processes involved.
Hitherto no effective solutions have been proposed to solve the above problem.